The day I lost it: Confessions of a killer

I swear I felt her spirit as it left her body. There seemed a great expression of "at last I am free of that life". Free from a lifetime of suffering - the unwanted reason for a shotgun marriage, her warring parents, her alcoholic father, her own disastrous marriage, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, four children born in quick succession - and precious little support. In a sense, the moment I killed my mother I felt the paradox, for what I was inflicting on her, under the influence of madness, was the greatest violence I could muster to destroy her forever, for all that she had grievously inflicted upon me. Yet she had escaped.

I was left. In the most horrible circumstances imaginable. That insight into her soul's flight never helped me one bit in the horrible 10 years that followed. I had killed the being who gave me life. It was New Year's Eve but the story began how many generations back I will never know.

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Both of my parents' fathers had difficult lives. One was an alcoholic, the other was left a partial invalid by the horrors of the First World War. On the paternal side, my grandmother was of the Victorian era, cold, brittle, divorced from warmth. On the maternal side, feisty, by one account stirring up trouble wherever she went and described in one word by my mother: "the bitch". As a child I witnessed my mother's parents fight; they stood there enjoyably screaming hate at each other. That was the way they loved each other.

My own parents also had the most acrimonious relationship. Usually taking the form of my father's cruel mental victimisation, the bitterness and hatred within him at times seemed bottomless. Much of my parents' hatred was turned on me. I can feel my mother's energy now as she said things like, "I wish I had strangled you at birth", "you know where you are going to end up" (laden with doom), and the most confounding for an adolescent "you male slut". To my father, I was a great disappointment and worse, I sided with my mother. I also suffered his beatings, but it was the mental, the emotional abuse that was worst of all.

By my teens the damage had already been done. The first tender months I took it as I emerged into my parents' mayhem. It was the environment that created sickness in me. I am a highly sensitive person, the second child and first boy - I sensed my mother's distress as all babies do. The birth had been a bad one, according to my mother, the most difficult of the four children - a long, painful labour for which my father was not present. Perhaps I hadn't wanted to come out, sensing how life was going to be.

Faced with an antagonised, enraged, and unsupported mother, I shattered into pieces. I could never develop a healthy sense of self, faced with this terrifying being. How could she give me the love I needed with the struggle she had? I internalised that rage. In retrospect, trying to puzzle all of this out, I came up with what some psychologists call a core belief, others a primal lie: "I must be evil". It made sense at the time.

As I grew, I learnt that to get my mother's love I had to give up my masculinity, my sense of self. It wasn't OK for me to behave like a boy, and when I did that's when she got hostile and the insults flew. Essentially, this early castration was what led to events on that day 25 years later. Imagine a spring being wound up tighter and tighter, year after year; when the spring finally breaks there is no discrimination over what happens.

I did, though, have a better connection with my father which has given me some strength and now the relationship is very strong, our disaster, ironically, having reunited us.

I was followed by twin boys. They fared better than me, being more robust and having one another. Because they came later, and I was satisfying the emotional needs of my mother, they didn't live with the same dynamic. As teenagers they simply labelled our parents as "Bum and Bad". By being the most sensitive and the weakest, as time went on, I became, willingly, the family scapegoat. The unhealthy emotional load on the family needed to be discharged and it went through the weakest link. Even now the family as a whole doesn't understand what happened and mainly see it all in terms of the illness.

In order to support my mother, I never grew out of an emotionally incestuous relationship with her. I was sucked in and overwhelmed by her. She needed this in order to survive. I remained psychologically enmeshed with her for years after her death. During their marriage, this created added rage and violence from my father towards me, because as one rather famous woman put it "there were three of us in this marriage".

I remember being numbed out in my teenage years, except for bursts of violent creativity, such as throwing stones at buses, later vandalising street furniture and then, with peers, wrecking schools. My life got good when I left home, travelling across Africa and Europe and belonging to the drug culture. I was careful, though; I mainly used cannabis, but I certainly wouldn't blame that on creating my illness - it didn't help, but it's obvious that I always would have broken down.

In the mid 1980s, while working on a fruit farm in Denmark, a woman asked me if I'd fought in the Falklands, as to her I was in the same state as her brother when he came back from Vietnam.

Anyhow, while picking plums and blackcurrants, I decided I wanted more meaningful work and a relationship. I came back to London and began working with homeless people and found a girlfriend. Unfortunately, the relationship and adult responsibilities opened me up to how vulnerable I really was. I began to hear voices and within 18 months had become fully psychotic. Most of my inner circle didn't have any experience of this and it went unchecked, plus I didn't reveal the full, dangerous extent of it. I really didn't want to go into a mental hospital where the chances were I would be treated horribly.

At first I would just hear voices calling me a "wanker" on the bus, but these hallucinations steadily became more terrifying and persecutory through Halloween and onwards when I believed that there were forces that wanted me dead and were messing about with me. I was also at times feeling violent, and believing that other people I met were murderers. This world was a living nightmare. I sometimes believed that this was the reality of adulthood and I had to find some way to get through it and survive - without help.

I asked my GP for help; he asked me if I felt I needed to be hospitalised. Inside I was screaming "yes, yes", but reason said, "No, I just need to get through this bad patch." I broke down and asked my mother for help on the phone, but she didn't know how to respond and didn't pass the message on to my father, as I had asked her to. Our mail was also stolen, so I missed the appointment with the psychiatrist the GP had referred me to.

I took unpaid leave from work and then the worst possible time came up: Christmas. I just became more and more ill, hearing voices all the time, believing that black magic was going on around me and that people were trying to get me to commit suicide. I spent Christmas at my girlfriend's family home, (omega) visibly unwell. Her mother was an experienced social worker but didn't seem able to get involved in her own home. I was left to my own devices.

On the train down to London I thought a black baby was the devil. Although very sick, I kept up a front, but I believe the signs would have been there for the more experienced person. How I wish I had taken my clothes off and run up the train, or some other bizarre act, but I was determined to stay in control and not let it beat me. According to my girlfriend I went from madness to complete lucidity, at which times she thought I was OK.

It had exhausted my girlfriend being with me, so I had made that journey down south on my own. It was a very distressing time as I felt all the people who were closest to me were involved in trying to kill me. Hence I couldn't tell them exactly what was going on. After a night and a day at the family home, I ran out saying, "It's not your fault but I just can't live with the family anymore." I saw my mother as the grim reaper and when I went to the train station, I had to hold very tightly on to a bench as there was a powerful compulsion to jump under the incoming train.

I met my girlfriend on the train as she came down the line. By now I was dangerous to her. Prior to this I had been thrown off a train by the guard who showed me his ID card which I read as "grim reaper". I said, "You don't understand what's happening to me I've got to stay on this train." Having left the train, I nearly went for help, but I thought the police would ridicule me and everyone else - such as the Samaritans - seemed in on the plot to kill me.

Persuaded and calmed by my girlfriend, we went back to my family home the next day. I wanted to give people Christmas presents, to be normal and "good". Finally, while in the kitchen after weeks of persecutory voices and days of no sleep, I lost control and went berserk. At the end of it I had strangled my mother and stabbed my cousin.

The horror for my family was immense. Unfortunately neither my brothers nor my father had been there to intervene. For the family it must have seemed inconceivable that I could become like that. I went to prison and then a special hospital. My father, remarkably, immediately became supportive, sending down his solicitor, and held the family together, encouraging everyone to be supportive. This was important to my survival and recovery and I had many visits over the years.

The years in the hospital were very unpleasant. Total disaster had befallen me. I was confused. I was both perpetrator and victim. I was told I was not responsible, but the atmosphere was one of heavy punishment. The horror of killing was a really traumatic memory and the impact of ending up in such an environment was massive. I had to face my own sickness and a future that had been shattered, in a place where there was very little compassion - in fact many staff were harsh in their treatment, and many were directly abusive. To be kicked when I was down as low as I could get could have finished me off, as it did others.

The media in particular makes a lot of money out of such places and it always used to horrify me the way they would constantly rehash stories about Brady or Sutcliffe which can't benefit anyone in real terms. Fortunately, the friends and family who came to visit me kept me afloat. It hurts me still to recall the times I came back from being visited to go through day rooms where people sat there and never seemed to get visitors at all.

However, there were also some helpful and caring people working in the hospital and I formed close bonds with peers in similar predicaments. These were very sustaining. After four years, I found my way to the most amazing, caring female nurse, called Julie. There was a great connection between us. I spent three years working with her. Prior to this I had been devastated - at the end of it I was ready to leave. So committed was she that she once told me that she saw me more often than her kids.

There were also a lot of activities at the hospital, if you were well enough, and self-motivated. These were very helpful in the recovery I was making. Without them I would have really struggled to recover from the situation. I took full advantage, edited the patients' magazine, played football, did a City and Guilds course in gardening, took part in theatre and so on.

I then moved to a less secure hospital; after the serious prison atmosphere of the last place, this was like a honeymoon. The staff were so much more friendly. I spent about six months there and then went to a hostel.

When I came out, I was very vulnerable, being crippled with guilt, anger and paranoia. Unfortunately, I was then given a specialist mental team who had a great lack of understanding as to why I became ill, who I was and what I was struggling with. Legally, the team were responsible for me. This is very threatening for a psychiatrist as there is such a blame culture (they can have their career stalled or destroyed) in this country, fed by media sensationalism and distortion around schizophrenia.

To then not understand the case he was dealing with and to believe that there was a possibility that I could do the same again quite easily (as he told me more than once), I know the psychiatrist found terrifying. This combined ignorance and fear destroyed the relationship and, sadly, rather than being a support they often disturbed me.

I was fortunate, however, in that I knew what they were like and had very little belief in their limited medical-model understanding. I had been educated in its failings over 10 years. I found an excellent private psychotherapist within weeks of being out. It is to him that I am thankful for my recovery to this point.

As it is now I work, I have healthy relationships with my family, I live unassisted, and I have a wide circle of friends. It is 10 years since I left the Big House. I have invested a lot on my path of healing. I have done many differing things, explored spiritual groups, dancing, Reiki, and martial arts, I've read many self-help books. Fortunately, I have an in-built navigation system which has enabled me to find healing. My experience of forensic mental-health services is that they are largely reductionist, that is, they apply the limited understanding of the medical model and are dominated by risk, medication and punishment. We are routinely oppressed by a system that often refuses to hear what we need, and bends the truth to fit its fundamentalism.

I wonder how many others in the system have similar stories to tell. As a nursing manager I liked once said, so many people are in these places simply because of circumstances that push them over the edge. However, once there, we face stigma, voyeurism, bullying and others' judgement. Most of us just hide when we come out and live lives with our Big Secrets. There is little point in baring our souls to people who can't understand.

It brings to mind the penny slot machines where pennies drop and slowly push other pennies towards an edge, forced there by pressures they have no control over... Bang! Another headline. Or, as Robert Graves put it, "To be mad is not easy, will earn him no money, but a niche in the news."

Jimmy Smith is a pseudonym